Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Dahlen, F. A..
The earth's orbital acceleration about the moon is influenced by its ellipticity. In this paper it shown that the ellipticity affects tidal gravity by contributing directly to the lunar tide-generating potential (in addition to effecting the elastic-gravitational response of the solid earth and oceans to this potential).
A self-consistent theory for the mechanics of thin-skinned accretionary Coulomb wedges is developed and applied to the active fold-and-thrust belt of western Taiwan. The state of stress everywhere within a critical wedge is determined by solving the static equilibrium equations subject to the appropriate boundary conditions. The influence of wedge cohesion, which gives rise to a concave curvature of the critical topographic surface and affects the orientation of the principal stresses and Coulomb fracture within the wedge, is considered. The shape of the topographic surface and the angles at which thrust faults step up from the basal decollement in the Taiwanese belt is analyzed taking into account the extensive structural and fluid-pressure data available there. It is concluded that the gross geometry and structure of the Taiwan wedge are consistent with normal laboratory frictional and fracture strengths of sedimentary rocks.
Long-wavelength geoid anomalies due to lateral variations in the density or thickness of a thin layer in local isostatic equilibrium on the surface of a sphere depend sensitively on the assumed state of stress within the layer. A number of common intuitive definitions of local isostasy generally believed to be essentially identical are associated with quite different states of isostatic stress, and the corresponding theoretical geoid anomalies can vary by more than a factor of 2. This sensitivity of the theoretical anomaly to the exact definition of local isostasy constitutes an obstacle to any proposed program of interpreting or exploiting observed global isostatic geoid anomalies such as those associated with the aging of the oceanic lithosphere.
It is proposed that the ambient state of isostatic deviatoric stress in the ocean lithosphere is the minimum necessary for the support of the density and topographic anomalies associated with the elevation of the mid-ocean ridges. The principal evidence for this hypothesis is that it is in agreement with the observed oceanic intraplate earthquake mechanisms. The main deviatoric stresses are compressive perpendicular to the axis of the mid-ocean ridge, zero parallel to the ridge, and tensile vertically. At any given distance from the ridge the stress is maximum at the seafloor; it decreases with depth at about the same rate as the cooling of the lithosphere, so that the entire thermal boundary layer acts as a support to the global square root of age topography of the oceans.
The calculation of the theoretical period of the Chandler wobble is extended to account for the non-hydrostatic portion of the earth's equatorial bulge and the effect of the fluid core upon the lengthening of the period due to the pole tide. The theoretical period of a realistic perfectly elastic earth with an equilibrium pole tide is found to be 426.7 sidereal days, which is 8.5 days shorter than the observed period of 435.2 days. Using Rayleigh's principle for a rotating earth, this discrepancy is exploited together with the observed Chandler Q to place constraints on the frequency dependence of mantle anelasticity. In all cases these limits arise from exceeding the 68 percent confidence limits of + or - 2.6 days in the observed period. Since slight departures from an equilibrium pole tide affect the Q much more strongly than the period, these limits are believed to be robust.